SC14 Awards Ceremony Celebrates the Stars of the HPC Community

This week SC14 hosted an awards session to celebrate the contributions of researchers, from those just starting their careers to those whose contributions have made lasting impacts. The conference drew over 10,160 registered attendees who attended a technical program spanning six days and viewed the offerings of 356 exhibitors in New Orleans.

The following awards were presented at the conference:

The Best Paper Award went to “Scaling File System Metadata Performance with Stateless Caching and Bulk Insertion,” written by Kai Ren, Qing Zheng, Swapnil Patil, and Garth Gibson from Carnegie Mellon University.

The Best Student Paper Award was given to “Slim Fly: A Cost Effective Low Diameter Network Topology,” by Maciej Besta and Torsten Hoefler from ETH Zurich.

The ACM Gordon Bell Prize for best performance of a high performance application went to “Anton 2: Raising the Bar for Performance and Programmability in a Special-Purpose Molecular Dynamics Supercomputer,” from author David E. Shaw and collaborators at D.E. Shaw Research.

The Best Poster Award was presented to “Parallel High-Order Geometric Multigrid Methods on Adaptive Meshes for Highly Heterogeneous Nonlinear Stokes Flow Simulations of Earth’s Mantle,” by Johann Rudi, University of Texas at Austin; Hari Sundar, University of Utah; Tobin Isaac, University of Texas at Austin; Georg Stadler, University of Texas at Austin; Michael Gurnis, California Institute of Technology; and Omar Ghattas, University of Texas at Austin.

Other special awards given include:

The second annual SC Test of Time Award was presented to Bruce Hendrickson and Rob Leland of Sandia National Laboratories for their paper “A Multi-level Algorithm for Partitioning Graphs,” published in the proceedings of Supercomputing.

The George Michael Memorial Fellowship, awarded to exceptional PhD students, was presented to Harshitha Menon, University of Illinois and Alexander Breuer from the Technical University of Munich in Germany.

Finally, teams of students competed in the Student Cluster Challenge, a real-time, non-stop, 48-hour challenge in which teams of undergraduate and/or high school students assemble a small cluster on the SC14 exhibit floor and race to demonstrate the greatest sustained performance across a series of applications.

The overall winning team was the University of Texas – Austin, based on a combined score for workload completed, benchmark performance, conference attendance and interviews.

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